About Me

A child of the Southwest and of the 50s -- a woman who knew me well once said, 'Yeah, the 1850s.' Generally culturally conservative and distrustful of new and improved innovative change. Very seldom overtly serious, but many a truth is spoke in jest and all of my truths are. Worked my way through UT when I was up in my 30s. If I'd, by some horrible miscalculation ended up in Bryan, I would've worked my way through that school over there. Have worked all over in printing and publishing. I've held a bunch of jobs and quit all of them but one. I am a journeyman printer and followed the trade and heard its dying gasps as it was throttled by technological change. I had a sponsored blog on a newspaper but quit the job.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Sat night miscellany

An ittybitty two- or three-paragraph story on the Vicad business page Thursday indicated that the paper was laying off employees and cutting wages for survivors. Newspapers are surprisingly reluctant to cover their own affairs unless it is to trumpet the little bogus awards that their associations deal out to themselves so everybody can claim to be a prizewinning newspaper. The observant reader will have noticed that the paper barely has enough heft to make it all the way to the driveway these days. Maybe the circulation dept will require carriers to put stones or oyster shells in the little plastic sleeve to add weight. (No extra pay for the work, of course, as everyone is expected to pitch in during tough times like these.) The newsroom employees have been making sacrifices for years. most of the reporters when I was working up there were earning well below the salary for a first-year schoolteacher, and some bailed to become teachers, immediately raising their wages by 30% or 40%.While I am making my appointed rounds as a Census employee, I knock on doors and engage residents. A lady I spoke to on Friday came doddering to the door and insisted she needed to sit down immediately. She said she was just out of the hospital, having suffered a stroke. She was also smoking away on a cigarette. You almost have to admire so profound a devotion to self-destruction.

1 comment:

Yeah, imagine that. I see it all the time, mostly in the ER. No other species is as assuredly self-destructive as Homo sapien (what a misnomer, right?). Just when I think I've seen all the ways a person can hurt themselves and others, in comes another specimen of devolution. Wow a person could get really bummed out over such a sorry display of evolution in reverse........